Here is one book which I wish didn't have to end at all. Vladimir Nabokov recounts the treasured items of his past; his pampered childhood, his highborn ancestry, his artistic developments, his travels (with his family and later on in a forced exile during the Bolshevik Revolution), the many things that has escaped me as I blush over his luscious and shocking book "Lolita" many caffeinated afternoons ago. That the literary man when he is not bent on pen and paper, composing the best written narratives, is a lover of butterflies. He has devoted many hours since childhood in isolation, scouring floras in search for winged insects and various slugs, studying them and later authored an undiscovered species the Plebejus (Lysandra) cormion Nabokov. Apart from being one of the prominent writers of the 20th century, Nabokov is a synesthete. Pages were devoted to this queer condition of "sensory appetite" (well-written pages, with photographic clarity of a scientist and practiced flourish of a literati). I envy his prose: tender, sophisticated, meticulous in every sentence in uncovering the past "as if seeing through carefully wiped lenses of time", a voice reminiscent of the earliest literary pleasures I've had. I've never burned as much as I did with "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul." Yes, as with my early loves, I never got over it. I don't think I could ever put into words just how much I enjoyed this book (to think this was something that's been on the "to be read pile" since 2012).
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"In thinking of my successive tutors, I am concerned less with the queer dissonances they introduced into my young life than with the essential stability and completeness of that life. I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation and resolution of those jangling chords, something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and namedays used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors, in an alley of birches, limes and maples at its debouchment on the smooth-sounded space of the garden proper that separated the park and the house. I see the tablecloth and the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving, a fabulous foliage, exaggerated, no doubt, by the same faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return, that makes me always approach that banquet table from the outside, from the depths of the park- . . ." -- Speak, Memory
"The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait." -- Vladimir Nabokov, "Speak, Memory"
"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-- in a landscape selected at random-- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."-- Vladimir Nabokov, "Speak, Memory"
"While scientists sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."-- from the pages of "Speak, Memory"
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